Chapter 58: The Battle of Qingzhou. Qingzhou.

The army of three hundred thousand led by Empress Su Mingyue had already captured more than half of Qingzhou.

Heading south all the way from the border of Youzhou, they encountered almost no decent resistance along the way, and most of Qingzhou's commanderies and counties surrendered at the mere sight of them.

The army of three hundred thousand was like a red-hot knife slicing through lard, melting the entirety of Qingzhou beneath her horses' hooves.

However, Yuwen Shuo and Zhao Chongyuan did not give her much time.

When only half of Qingzhou had been occupied, the loyalist army of eight hundred thousand returned to reinforce it.

Zhao Chongyuan and Yuwen Shuo were no fools. Having spent their entire lives struggling in the Great Xia, they knew well that Qingzhou was the gateway from Youzhou to the Central Plains. Whoever held Qingzhou held the entire northern defensive line by its throat.

While they had still been scheming against each other in An Province, the moment they discovered that Empress Su Mingyue's Youzhou Iron Cavalry had penetrated deep into the heart of Qingzhou, they immediately set aside their grievances, joined forces, and led their massive army north at full speed.

Eight hundred thousand against three hundred thousand—the disparity in military strength was so vast that there was almost no suspense.

Empress Su Mingyue did not clash with them head-on. She decisively ordered the entire army to retreat, falling back all the way to Qingyun Mountain.

Qingyun Mountain was a natural barrier in central Qingzhou. The mountain range stretched for hundreds of miles from east to west, with overlapping peaks, leaving only a single pass about a hundred Zhang wide through which a massive army could pass.

Empress Su Mingyue deployed all three hundred thousand of her troops at this mountain pass.

Her central command tent was set up on a high ground behind the pass. Standing in front of the tent, she could take in the entire pass at a single glance.

She ordered one division to set up layers of defenses at the front of the pass, while another division worked day and night to construct defensive fortifications behind it.

Trenches, barricades, abatis, and watchtowers—every defensive structure that could be built in a short time was put to use.

Her plan was simple: use the natural barrier of Qingyun Mountain to wear down and trap Yuwen Shuo and Zhao Chongyuan's army of eight hundred thousand to death in this narrow pass.

The loyalist army did not give her enough time to finish the fortifications.

No sooner had the scouts' swift riders brought back news to the command tent that the enemy's vanguard had appeared twenty li outside the pass than the dense, dark mass of the enemy surged forward like a bursting tide.

Zhao Chongyuan and Yuwen Shuo knew very well that they could not let Empress Su Mingyue establish a firm foothold on Qingyun Mountain.

They ordered their vanguard to assault the pass at all costs, with the follow-up troops using drumbeats as their signal to push forward wave after wave as soon as the previous ones fell, never giving the Youzhou Army a single moment to catch their breath.

The battle raged from the afternoon deep into the night, and from the night until dawn.

The sparks from clashing swords merged into a single sheet in the night, so dense that it looked as if someone were striking whole fields of flint in the darkness.

Corpses littered the ground and blood flowed like rivers. The hundred-Zhang-wide pass of Qingyun Mountain was piled higher and higher with bodies, reaching the height of two men at its thickest point.

The soldiers of both armies continued to fight while stepping on the corpses of the fallen. Beneath their feet was a slippery mess of crushed organs and clotted blood, and the air was thick with the metallic sweetness of rust and the stench of incontinence.

Just as the enemy surged forward wave after wave like a tide, a strange whistling sound suddenly echoed from the ridge of Qingyun Mountain.

It was not the sharp whistle of arrows cutting through the air, nor the dull thud of catapults launching stones.

It was a lighter, more fluttering sound, like the flapping of wind through canvas. Giant "birds" began to fly down from the ridge one by one.

Of course, they were not real birds.

They were gliders made of sheepskin, bamboo frames, and thick hemp ropes.

The canopy was pieced together from cured sheepskin, the bamboo frames were light and resilient, and the wingspan stretched as wide as two men's outstretched arms.

A person lay prone, strapped beneath the underbelly of each glider, with three or four bulging waterskins tied to their bodies.

Aided by the rising updrafts of the ridge and the north wind, these gliders deftly soared over the dense enemy formations below, heading straight for the loyalist army's supply camp in the rear.

Ever since Empress Su Mingyue heard the story from "the legend of the condor heroes" about how Huang Rong used sheepskin rafts to make parachutes and attack Samarkand, she had been pondering this concept.

She had her craftsmen conduct repeated experiments and found countless cliffs in the Northern Border for her death soldiers to perform test flights.

After wave after wave of volunteers fell to their deaths, they finally produced a finished product that could glide for several li in the air without falling.

When she set out to conquer Qingzhou, she mobilized this flying army.

The gliders flew over the main enemy forces and headed straight for the loyalist army's supply camp.

Upon reaching the airspace above the supplies, the riders beneath the gliders slashed open their waterskins. Drops of dark, viscous oil rained down from the sky, landing on the haystacks, the grain transport wagons, and the tents.

Immediately after, lit oilcloths were tossed down from the gliders.

The dry haystacks caught the sparks, and with the fuel of the oil, the fire spread from a tiny speck into a sea of flames at a speed too fast for the naked eye to follow.

The flames leaped higher than the tents, and billowing black smoke surged into the sky, painting half of it red.

In less than fifteen minutes, the entire rear of the loyalist army was turned into a sea of fire.

The loyalist soldiers fiercely assaulting the pass at the front heard the commotion behind them and looked back.

The horizon burned bright red, and the firelight reflected on their faces, casting flickering light over their bloody, youthful countenances. Those were their supplies.

They knew all too well that without supplies, a massive army was nothing but sheep waiting to be slaughtered.

Under the reflection of the firelight, the faces of Zhao Chongyuan and Yuwen Shuo turned a terrifying shade of ashen-pale.

The two veteran generals drew their sabers almost simultaneously, roaring orders for their troops to intensify the attack.

They knew that the burning of their supplies meant the army could only hold out for a few days at most. Their only way out was to capture Qingyun Mountain and take down Empress Su Mingyue before they ran out of food, using the Youzhou Army's supplies to sustain themselves.

Thus, instead of weakening because of the burning supplies, the offensive became even more frenzied.

Standing on the high ground, Empress Su Mingyue took in both the firelight in the enemy's rear and their increasingly frantic offensive at the front.

There was no excess expression on her face. She merely issued orders in an orderly manner to rotate the wounded, deploy reserves, and plug the gaps in the defense.

The core troops she could deploy numbered only one hundred and fifty thousand. The other one hundred and fifty thousand were surrendered soldiers and local militias integrated along the way; they were poorly trained and ill-equipped, and keeping them in the rear would only slow down the march.

Thus, Empress Su Mingyue made a cruel decision: she pushed them to the very front to wear down the edge of the enemy's spearhead.

She herself, along with the true elites, waited in readiness at the second line of defense, sleeping with their weapons as pillows.

Only when those new recruits had almost completely perished at the front line of the pass, and the enemy's momentum had been thoroughly ground down, would she strike a fatal blow with her most precious core forces.

Fresh red blood continued to splash across the pass, soaking into the barren soil of Qingyun Mountain and building up a heavy, layered scent of rust.

When the piles of corpses at the pass grew so high that they almost overwhelmed the defenders' formations, Empress Su Mingyue ordered oil to be poured over the heaps of bodies.

Barrel after barrel of dark oil was poured down the hillside, drenching the layered mountain of corpses and sea of blood.

A torch was tossed into the heap of bodies, and the fire erupted violently, turning the entire hundred-Zhang-wide pass into a roaring wall of flames.

The enemy's offensive was finally brought to a sudden halt by this wall of fire.

No one could charge up through a fire burning at thousands of degrees. The scorched stench from the fire filled the entire pass, making the defenders cough, but it also temporarily blocked the enemy's path of advance.

After this great battle, only one hundred and fifty thousand of Empress Su Mingyue's army of three hundred thousand remained.

Most of the dead were the newly integrated surrendered soldiers and local militias; those who survived were elite troops and fierce generals forged through the fires of war in the Northern Border.

After fighting for an entire night, both sides were exhausted. Empress Su Mingyue ordered her troops to quickly rest and eat.

The early morning mountain wind carried a bone-chilling cold. The fires were still burning, and the scorched smoke, mixed with the smell of blood, shrouded the entirety of Qingyun Mountain.

Meanwhile, Yuwen Shuo and Zhao Chongyuan's loyalist army was not nearly as fortunate.

Their provisions had been burned to ashes by Empress Su Mingyue's fire, leaving hundreds of thousands of mouths without a single grain of rice to eat from then on.

The soldiers squatted on the battlefield, gnawing on half-cooked wheat grains dug out of the scorched earth, cursing heaven, earth, and their commanding generals.

Deserters had already begun to appear sporadically in the army. Officers patrolled back and forth on horseback, executing anyone caught fleeing on the spot, but their intimidation could not suppress the hunger in the soldiers' bellies.

The panic of losing their food, mingled with the thick, scorched smoke, spread silently across the battlefield.